Reign of Terror

by Spencer Ackerman

  The soon-to-be-renamed Renditions Group was not about to discipline its people for brutality. The CIA officer responsible for the Salt Pit remained there for eight months after Gul Rahman’s death. His name is not known, but before he left the Pit, a colleague recommended him for a twenty-five-hundred-dollar cash bonus for his “consistently superior work.” His experience in an enterprise that had frozen a man to death was considered enough of a credential, and his involvement in that death an insufficient obstacle, to certify him in April 2003 as an interrogator for other missions. The CIA’s executive director declined any disciplinary proceedings for him in February 2006, writing that torturing a man to death needed to be understood “within the operational context that existed at the time.” Early in the War on Terror, the CIA established that its officers could kill a man and its leadership would insulate their officers from any sanction.

  They had high-level legal cover. Months before the CIA set up its internal structures for the application of torture, Tenet petitioned the Justice Department to determine exactly how brutally the agency could treat those in its custody. Bush had already decreed that the military’s captives in Afghanistan would not be considered prisoners of war with acknowledged legal protections, but rather as unlawful enemy combatants, whose treatment would be at American discretion. That was insufficient to reassure Tenet, as federal law criminalized torture, including torture performed by anyone “acting under the color of law,” such as CIA officers. If the agency was going to torture people, Tenet was going to ensure that the rest of the administration was complicit. In August 2002, Yoo, at the Justice Department, issued his most infamous opinion of all. He and colleague Jay Bybee indemnified the CIA of any harm for implementing Mitchell and Jessen’s regimen by setting the legal threshold for illegal torture to stand at pain equivalent to organ failure or death and irreversible psychological damage.

  The agency was thus now in charge of a hidden detentions complex, a place invisible to any outside oversight, including from any attorney, judge, legislator, or human rights group. Not even the International Committee of the Red Cross, which trades public silence for access to disappeared detainees worldwide, knew of the black sites.

  The month before Gul Rahman died in Afghanistan, the Thailand black site received its second occupant, a man named Abdul Rahman al-Nashiri. Nashiri was the rare CIA detainee who had personally committed an act of violence, the November 2000 bombing of the USS Cole in Aden. Yoo’s memo suggests that the CIA represented to him that the use of torture would occur only after less coercive options failed. Nashiri, captured after the Justice Department memo, was tortured “immediately” upon arrival at the Thailand black site, according to a CIA inspector general’s report. The report records that Nashiri provided specific intelligence on “other terrorists” on “his first day” in captivity, but on his twelfth, the CIA waterboarded him anyway.

  Nashiri’s interrogators instructed him to keep his hands on his cell wall for three days during which the CIA denied him food. While Nashiri knelt, they put a broomstick behind his knees and abruptly bent his spine back, separating his knee joints. They tied Nashiri’s wrists with a belt and suspended him from the restraint, arms raised behind him. The CIA staff at the black site feared they would dislocate Nashiri’s shoulders, and one unidentified official later recollected that he “had to intercede,” but the CIA’s inspector general does not record the results.

  For the final weeks in fall 2002 that the black site existed, its chief was Gina Haspel, a Kentuckian air force brat with a passion for Johnny Cash. She permitted Nashiri’s torture to continue until fears of the black site’s location leaking prompted his move to a military base in northeast Poland known as Stare Kiejkuty. There his torture intensified to include a mock execution and the threat of rape of his mother, prompting someone later identified as the CIA’s interrogations chief to threaten resignation. “To continue to use enhanced technique[s] without clear indications that he [is] withholding important info is excessive and may cause him to cease cooperation on any level,” the chief cabled. Later Haspel took over the interrogation program, according to a memoir by the CIA’s top attorney, and later still aided in destroying ninety-two videotapes from her black site documenting Abu Zubaydah’s and Nashiri’s torture.

  Under three directors and over the course of six years, the CIA held and tortured at least 119 men. An unknown number, believed to be far greater, were sent to its partners’ torture chambers, a process known as extraordinary rendition. One of the rendered, Abdul-Hakim Belhaj, was a Libyan jihadist determined to overthrow Qaddafi. The CIA gave Belhaj as a gift to its new renditions partner, along with his pregnant wife, Fatima Boudchar. As the agency transferred custody, it took pictures of her bound and naked body. The CIA institutionalization of torture begun by Tenet in January 2003 required that such records be made should the agency ever have to contest who was responsible for deaths in partner custody. The CIA had sexually violated Boudchar, a violation that its internal guidelines justified. A Senate report later found that when detainees refused to eat in protest of their conditions, the agency would insert pureed food into their anuses, another sexual violation, and one the CIA claimed was necessary for the detainees’ nutrition.

  The CIA never called this regimen torture. Not only was torture illegal, it was the sort of thing barbaric nations did. All of the CIA’s not-torture occurred cynically, down to the diplomatic assurances that the CIA’s allies provided that they wouldn’t torture the individuals the CIA turned over to them. The agency came up with a euphemism for its actions, one that it expected politicians and journalists to use, as it took umbrage at anyone who would impugn its officials by describing their actions as torture. In what would amount to a years-long fake-news campaign about the nature and efficacy of its brutality, the CIA called it enhanced interrogation.

  Enhanced interrogation did not remain within the warrens of the black sites. It spread to the Antilles within a year of its adoption.

  The Pentagon sent what it considered its highest-value and most dangerous terrorist suspects from the battlefield of Afghanistan to its naval station at Guantanamo Bay. While it characterized a detainee population that would come to include eight hundred people as the “worst of the worst,” many, if not most, were suspected only of some nebulous Taliban affiliation, several steps in importance removed from bin Laden. They were not even tactically relevant to the Afghanistan war, which would have prompted the U.S. to lock them up in the enormous prison on the outskirts of the Bagram air field, an hour’s drive from Kabul, which held about a thousand people at a time.

  Their legal status was nebulous. In February 2002, Bush established that although the United States wouldn’t consider al-Qaeda and the Taliban “lawful combatants,” they could be held until the end of hostilities. For the purposes of denying its captives access to U.S. federal courts that might free them, Guantanamo—the Cuban base for which the U.S. military annually wrote Fidel Castro a $4,085 check he never cashed—was legally designated as foreign soil. Simultaneously, to indemnify military personnel for any acts of torture conducted on foreign soil, Guantanamo was deemed to be U.S. territory, as the U.S. military flew its flag above the base. What mattered was establishing, by whatever means possible, a state of exception. No one could stop the military from doing as it liked at Guantanamo, much as no one could stop the CIA from doing as it liked at the black sites. There was even a CIA black site at Guantanamo.

  By the fall of 2002, with Guantanamo officials under pressure to produce actionable intelligence from a detainee cohort presumed to possess it, the new military command overseeing the detentions called the CIA in for advice, even though the CIA is not subject to the law of armed conflict. A Counterterrorism Center attorney, Jonathan Fredman, arrived in October. Fredman later told the Senate that his guidance had been that the military had to operate within clear, nonsubjective legal guidelines—at the time, those set by John Yoo. Fredman warned that p
enalties for violating the federal antitorture statute, particularly “should a detainee die,” could include capital punishment. An attendee of his briefings, Joint Task Force Guantanamo staff officer Lieutenant Colonel Diane Beaver, recorded her takeaway, one that would be emblematic of Guantanamo, a place beyond law: “If the detainee dies, you’re doing it wrong.”

  Weeks later Guantanamo took on as an interrogator a naval reserve officer named Richard Zuley. He had done similar work on Black people as a detective in the infamously racist and brutal Chicago police. Benita Johnson remembered Zuley shackling her to an eyebolt in an interrogation room for an entire day and threatening her with the loss of her children unless she signed a statement implicating her ex-boyfriend in the murder of a white woman, Renee Rondeau. Another Zuley target, Latherial Boyd, who would be exonerated for murder after twenty-three years in prison, recalled Zuley searching his loft and saying, “No nigger is supposed to live like this.” Now, at Guantanamo, Zuley stood before a man named Mohamedou Ould Slahi. Arabic-speaking interrogators put a hooded Slahi on a boat in the bay before stuffing ice in his jacket and repeatedly punching him. Slahi remembered, “I wasn’t me after that.” Zuley threatened to bring Slahi’s mother to Guantanamo, which Slahi’s attorneys later understood to be a rape threat. Slahi said he would say whatever the Americans wanted, “I don’t care, as long as you are pleased.” Torture might have come to Guantanamo from the CIA and the Justice Department, but it also came from American cities like Chicago.

  By Thanksgiving 2002, Guantanamo interrogators stripped naked a man thought to have been al-Qaeda’s intended twentieth 9/11 hijacker. They denied him sleep for twenty hours a day, menaced him with dogs, and forced him to pray to an idol shrine. Another detainee was sexually humiliated by a woman interrogator, who smeared him with what she portrayed as menstrual blood. One technique for inducing sleep deprivation involved deafeningly loud music, often the nu-metal band Drowning Pool chanting “let the bodies hit the floor.” Another involved “stress positions” that rendered sleep impossible, often by stretching detainees so their restraints would hurt them should their muscles slacken. Rumsfeld, who approved torture at Guantanamo in early December, commented in a memo on forced standing, “I stand for 8–10 hours a day.” Unlike at the CIA, however, the military’s senior attorneys, and especially the navy’s, resisted torture, on not only legal but moral grounds. Alberto Mora, the navy general counsel, argued that institutionalized cruelty was a Rubicon from which constitutional government could never return. “If you make this exception, the whole Constitution crumbles,” he told the journalist Jane Mayer.

  Inside Guantanamo was an Al Jazeera cameraman named Sami Muhyideen al-Hajj. Al-Hajj, arrested by the Pakistanis as he and a colleague tried to cross the Afghanistan–Pakistan border for work in December 2001, said he was interrogated extensively about any relationship between Al Jazeera and al-Qaeda. He claimed that the interrogators asked him over a hundred times just about the war correspondent Ahmed Mansour. It would not be until 2006 that the Pentagon officially acknowledged it held al-Hajj at all. The Committee to Protect Journalists, noting a lack of American solidarity, said that year that he was “virtually unknown in U.S. media circles.”

  Guantanamo even caged a child. Omar Khadr’s parents were Canadian al-Qaeda sympathizers. They took the boy to Afghanistan and introduced him to a life of militancy. They lent him as a translator to a compound that Army Special Forces raided in July 2002. During the raid, a grenade mortally wounded Sergeant First Class Christopher Speer. For years after, the U.S military maintained that the fifteen-year-old Khadr, wounded to the point of losing his left eye, had thrown the grenade. On his arrival at Guantanamo in October, guards hog-tied the boy. Left alone so long that he urinated, the guards threw solvent on the floor, elevated his legs, and used Khadr as a human mop. A Canadian intelligence operative who interviewed Khadr at Guantanamo months later said that he viewed al-Qaeda “through the eyes of a child.” Very few people at Guantanamo were ever charged with a war crime. But the U.S. eventually brought a teenaged captive, who would grow into manhood at Guantanamo, before a military tribunal.

  It took barely a year after 9/11 for America, in its righteousness, to torture a wounded child. Mora’s insight was that once America was willing to do such things, it was willing to do anything to anyone, in a boundaryless war. Its most agonizing battlefield—one created by a show of dominance by the right against the Security State—loomed on the horizon.

  CHAPTER TWO

  9/11 AND THE RIGHT

  2001–2006

  Two months after the towers fell, Attorney General John Ashcroft instructed federal prosecutors to conduct an unusual sort of roundup. They and the FBI were to question some five thousand recent immigrants, men between the ages of eighteen and thirty-two who had recently arrived from countries that the Justice Department did not publicly identify. By Ashcroft’s admission, these young men were not terrorists. There was no suspicion any of them had so much as overstayed their visas. Instead, as he explained in a November 2001 speech, the point of the questioning was to “expand our knowledge of terrorist networks operating inside the United States.” Thousands of Muslim men were thus expected to prove their loyalty by informing on their neighbors.

  Reflecting the precarious situation of American Muslims after 9/11, one of their leading advocacy groups, the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), tempered its criticism of Ashcroft. Executive director Nihad Awad pleaded that “all elements of due process and respect for civil liberties be adhered to” as the “interviews” unfolded. He leavened his statement with an assurance that “American Muslims condemn terrorism in all its forms.” The American Civil Liberties Union, more safely positioned, stridently denounced Ashcroft’s “blatant racial profiling.” Even local police departments were discomfited. Charles Wilson, chief of police in Detroit, said he didn’t want his officers to “treat people like criminals, or even go out and find these people.” Ashcroft, testifying at a Senate panel soon after, was indignant at the criticism. He had, he insisted, merely “offered noncitizens willing to come forward . . . a chance to live in this country.”

  Soon after 9/11, criticisms of the emerging War on Terror began taking form in predictable circles: Muslims, lawyers, concerned members of the security community, and anyone else reciting from the old liberal hymnal about how protecting the country risked disfiguring it. Victory in the Cold War was supposed to have decisively refuted what conservative writer James Burnham had termed the ideology of Western suicide. Instead, at a time of danger, liberalism was looking past a terrorist enemy that, as Ashcroft put it, “threatens civilization.” Its tactics included “infiltrating our communities,” providing journalists with “stories of torture and mistreatment,” and “exploit[ing] our judicial process.” In so doing, the enemy waged its war not only on foreign battlefields but through the institutions of liberalism in the United States. “To those who scare peace-loving people with phantoms of lost liberty,” he told the Senate Judiciary Committee, “my message is this: your tactics only aid terrorists, for they erode our national unity and diminish our resolve.”

  Muslim immigrants were not the only ones who had to prove their loyalty. That day Ashcroft established a key ideological template: what Muslim terrorists were unable to destroy, many on the right would argue, liberals would. They would do so through respectable means already under their control: so-called “due process” roadblocks from their lawyers, slanders and equivocations in their news outlets, restrictions imposed by their politicians, and obstruction from their shadow state of bureaucrats. Beyond those official mechanisms lay cultural danger: liberals identified not with America, but with its enemies. As long as America tolerated such constraints, it would not be free to win. “The decadent left,” burrowed within “its enclaves on the coasts,” wrote influential conservative journalist Andrew Sullivan, “may well mount a fifth column.” Even college students could apply Ashcroft’s template. “
There are profound political forces within and without the United States that would like to see us stand down . . . and cease the post-9/11 strategy that has kept the terrorists on the defensive and prevented a second attack inside our borders,” a Duke University junior named Stephen Miller argued in 2006. Liberal and left dissent, Miller promised, carries “the possibility of someday being stained with the blood of the innocent Americans whose country they betrayed.”

  Even as the right assailed liberals for not emerging from their “holiday from history,” it drew upon another familiar theme. “There is a religious war going on in this country,” the nativist politician and columnist Pat Buchanan had argued in 1992, a “cultural war, as critical to the kind of nation we shall be as was the Cold War itself, for this war is for the soul of America.” Buchanan and his antiglobalist foreign policy views were marginal within the Republican Party on 9/11, but the politics of cultural grievance that he practiced—white cultural grievance—had kept the conservative coalition united after the end of the Cold War removed its centripetal force. Those politics lent themselves well to a war against a nonwhite foe primarily associated with a non-Christian religion few white Americans practiced and whose ambitions were understood to be global.

  For years after the September 11 attacks, these War on Terror politics offered the right what it considered a path to sustained national dominance. Bush’s first-term approval ratings averaged 62 percent. “Conservatives saw the savagery of 9/11 in the attacks and prepared for war,” his political architect, Karl Rove, explained at a fundraiser, while “liberals saw the savagery of the 9/11 attacks and wanted to prepare indictments and offer therapy and understanding for our attackers.” When Bush was popular, the right lionized him as a man of history. But as the war dragged on, it came to consider his definition of the enemy as not just euphemistic, but tragically complicit in liberal orthodoxies about cultural sensitivity that prevented an honest identification of the enemy. All schools of conservative thought agreed on a central point. “Victory in war, and particularly in counterinsurgency wars,” wrote the American Enterprise Institute’s Fred Kagan, “requires knowing one’s enemy.” When Bush ceased being popular, he accommodated the dissatisfaction on the right by offering a more explicitly Islamic conception of the adversary.